It took 100 years for scholars to discover books in Mark Twain’s personal library that he had copiously annotated.  But future Mark Twains need not worry that their own notes will remain in obscurity. With the touch of a button they can share their comments with the world, thanks to a Kindle feature called “Popular Highlights”.

“Marked by a dotted underscore that indicates that other Kindle users have found the passages significant,” writes Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times, “popular highlights constitute crowd-sourced literary criticism. Readers, on the spot and yet collaboratively, make meaning of what they’re reading.” By clicking on the popular highlights function you can discover how many other Kindle readers found a passage to be as noteworthy as you thought it was.  Unfortunately, many readers are not aware that the function has been activated, and, as they read what they thought was a virginal edition, they discover someone else’s spoor all over it. A lot of someone elses in fact.

You would think that Heffernan would hate the feature, and at first she clearly disliked it.  All she had to do was disable it, but she thought better of it. “There’s a genie-in-the-bottle problem here. As with many things on the Web, once you’ve glimpsed popular highlights, it’s hard to unglimpse them. You get curious about what other readers think, especially with a book like ‘Freedom,’  which bookstore windows and airplane waiting lounges would have you believe everyone is thinking about. Reading, after all, is only superficially solitary; in fact, it’s a form of intensive participation in language and the building of common culture.”

Hmmm. “Reading is only superficially solitary.” I like that.  I’m going to highlight that.  How about you? Are you going to highlight it too?

Read E-Readers’ Collective

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting conducted by the New York Times.